Week 10: Social Racer

PDF Download: Newsletter: Week 10

This week marks the beginning of a new cycle and a new assignment for team PlayStation Ignite. This time, we’ve been given a very specific game mechanic to work with, but an interesting challenge posed alongside it: make a driving game like “Ivan ‘Ironman’ Stewart’s Super Off Road” or “Super Sprint”, but incorporate a social aspect that pulls from social media. The assignment is intentionally vague as to the actual social aspect we should use; it’s up to use to figure that one out! We have the freedom to explore all sorts of social media sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Newsletter10Pic2

We began the week by brainstorming questions of why people use various forms of social media, as well as why people might want to play a game that involves using their or their friends’ personal information. What does social mean in the context of a racing game? Why would people want to play our game over another game that doesn’t incorporate the social aspect? Using these questions as prompts  we’ve come up with something that we think is fun and can work well in the context of the constraints we’ve been given.Newsletter10Pic1

The idea goes like this: there are photographs scattered around the race course that belong to mutual Facebook friends of the racers. These mutual friends are scattered around the course at target locations, and the goal is to match the photos to the correct friend in the shortest amount of time possible.  The first player to correctly identify the mutual friend from his photos wins the round, and a new set of photos is introduced to the course.

We put together a simple paper prototype of the concept to test out the basic idea.  Try for yourself on the right!

We’ve spent the rest of our time this week working on theming, story, and art style. We have a pretty strong idea of the direction we’ll be taking this idea, and we’ll pitch that to the Sony team on Monday. We hope that with a strong visual style and story, we can deliver a consistent and cohesive game this round, and create something unique and fun.

We’re very excited about our new game and we can’t wait to see what this turns into over the next 2 weeks. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more excited game development news!

– Team PlayStation Ignite